Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/908245
to be aware of and adjust for home. Luckily, the RMU emulates this in monitoring so you can hear the way it's going to be heard by consumers. Any differences when mixing for streaming? Streaming uses Dolby Atmos Digital Plus encoding, which is lossy (unlike TrueHD which is lossless). So, it's not going to sound exactly like it does coming out of my console, but the same intent of the mix is there. Monitoring the DD+ to hear the differences is always recommended, and now with the new ASTC 3.0 standard, Dolby Atmos is ramping up with Dolby Atmos AC-4 encoding which will be very efficient for streaming. Have you changed any of your Dolby Atmos workflows since Pro Tools 12.8 was released? Before 12.8, the Dolby Atmos panner was a plugin. In order to pan, I used to use custom fader plugin mapping to pull up the panning parameters to the faders on my Icon D-Control, since you can do that and because I couldn't use my joysticks to pan for any height data. I put the X and Y on faders to my left and the Z (height) on my right faders. I became really quick working that way. Now with 12.8, the Dolby Atmos info is in the panner, so I can't map them and I had to relearn the panning approach. However, when I go to our big Hollywood stage, this is good because we have an S6 and I can use the joysticks or the master touch module. However, it would be great if [the Dolby Atmos panner] could work with the Icon joysticks. What other things have you noticed? [Note: Tim is using 12.8.2] When I'm using a separate system as a recorder, it's a lot easier in 12.8 to set up the recorder system for recording the metadata. It's nice that it links to your RMU in the Peripherals really easily. Also, you can have your bussing match your RMU exactly via a dropdown bussing tab within the I/O page. So if you have specific beds and objects set up in your RMU, it lists all your busses to match the RMU. You can also batch rename tracks, which is great if you have a bunch of objects and you need to have different names of the actual tracks that you printed. What do you end up with when you print a Home Dolby Atmos mix? I print to the RMU and, unlike with a theatrical RMU where you'll print MXF files with your Dolby Atmos engineer, for Home Theater Atmos, it creates an .atmos file. Some people call it a DAMF (Dolby Atmos Master File), which is actually the older name, but the name is still commonly used. The DAMF contains three things; an .atmos file, an .atmos metadata file, and an .atmos audio file. Those three files then go to a Dolby Atmos TrueHD encoder. Interestingly, the TrueHD encode will also make an .ac3 5.1 encode. That way, if you have an older decoder that can't read TrueHD (usually, anything without an HDMI input), it'll still be able to play a 5.1. You also choose a 7.1 or 5.1 (more common) core that will play, based on deliverables. Also, now in 12.8, Pro Tools has the flexibility to create and/or import an ADM .WAV file, which basically consists of one large 128-channel .WAV file with Dolby Atmos panning metadata baked in. You can create these from the DAMFs and then import back into Pro Tools with the internal panner data in place to re-edit for versioning or streaming level requirement adjustments if need be. I've exported them, imported them, speed corrected them 24fps to 23.976fps and, so far, it's been robust. 5,700 MILES AWAY, across the Atlantic, Portugal's Branko Neskov CAS shared some of his thoughts. How long have you been mixing in Dolby Atmos? I did my first Dolby Atmos mix relatively early—April 2013. It was a theatrical mix done in six weeks for a Russian film called SOLDAT, directed by Aleksandr Chernyaev. We used the Euphonix S5 console on that. Since then, I've done several trailers and another feature film in Dolby Atmos. Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite re-render output matrix